Poorer Than You » Net WorthMoney issues for college students and 20-somethings, without being boring.2015-02-06T02:43:07Zhttp://poorerthanyou.com/feed/atom/WordPressStephaniehttp://poorerthanyou.com/?p=17762015-02-02T05:02:39Z2015-02-02T13:00:00Z
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A nice (very nice!) change there. But, I don’t expect the trend to continue at quite such a speedy way. This month, there were a lot of boosts to my accounts from the start of the year (matching deposits into retirement accounts), whereas next month, I expect to be shelling out for at least one big expenditure: a new computer. And not just any old computer – I’m pimping out the best built-from-scratch computer I can afford in order to handle the livestream broadcast for my charity fundraising group, the U-Pick Video Game Marathon for Charity.

Not that, you know, I won’t use the new computer for other things than charity fundraisers. It’ll replace my seriously aging laptop, and I will use it’s awesome power to handle new video games to… play lots of new video games. Or at least, work through the ridiculous backlog of Steam games I’ve picked up during Steam sales and Humble Bundles.

But anyway, my husband and I have been saving up for new computers for a while now. In December we bought him a new Chromebook with some of the money in the “New Computers” savings account, and this month, we’ll be spending the rest building our ridiculous gaming/streaming rig. Success!

What savings goal are you looking forward to reaching, so that you can finally buy, build, or make what you’ve been saving for? Let me know in the comments, below!

The conflict of interest that put this site on hiatus is over. The future holds a lot of updates and changes to the blog, but before we get into any of that, let’s do a post just on what happened in my personal net worth while I wasn’t writing:

A few goals hit their deadlines…

You may recall the main goal I was working toward: getting to a positive net worth by September 16th, 2014 (10 years from the date I took out my first student loan and my net worth slid into the negative). And I did tentatively call that goal “achieved” back in February, when my net worth rose into the positive numbers for the first time in my adult life.

Now that September 16th, 2014 has passed, we can look back and see that, yes, I did it! Though my net worth did wobble dangerously close to the negative line again, it stayed positive right through September and for all the months since then.

Just having achieved that goal will make me pretty unbearable to deal with for a while. But I also had another, lesser-discussed goal on the table. In November of 2013, I declared a new goal to see my retirement accounts hit a total of $30,000 within a year.

What else happened?

The line graph for these months is awfully squiggley. Ups and downs were had, to be sure.

But that was expected. I started a new job, which paid less than my previous position, but had better benefits. My commute changed, and suddenly I was leaving my car at home for days at a time and reading the entire A Song of Ice and Fire series on bus and train rides.

I got married, and went on a honeymoon. My now-husband (!) and I saved up; paid for most of it ourselves, but also received generous help from friends and family for both events. We set up a “honeymoon registry” so that most of the wedding gifts we received were contributions to our honeymoon fund.

So we saved, and received some gifts. And all of that went right back out the door as we spent on the wedding and splurged on the honeymoon. It could have turned out to be a flat year – and I wouldn’t have been surprised, really. But the overall trend was, despite it all, upward.

And I still got my ‘cheevos.

To combine or not to combine…

While I was tabulating all of these net worth numbers, my husband walked up behind me to ask a question that had been rolling around in my own head as well:

Should we be including all of my husband’s information in these net worth updates?

The short answer: no.

I don’t keep an eye on my husband’s account balances day-to-day, so I’m not going to do it for the monthly net worth update, either. We have a few joint savings accounts (one for each common goal that we are both working toward), but have otherwise decided to maintain our separate accounts. He sends me a monthly Person2Person payment between our Capital One 360 checking accounts to cover his share of the monthly household expenses.

Besides, this blog is my financial journey. Though his help and income certainly play into that, his accounts (that I don’t touch) do not.

Dance party time!

Two ‘cheevos and a wedding this update? I’m feelin’ that it’s time for a dance party. Join me in the comments for some untz untz (animated dancing gifs, YouTube embeds – pick your poison).

]]>Prepare yourself for a lot of exclamation points, bold text, italics, and maybe even some ALL CAPS… because this is the most exciting Net Worth update in Poorer Than You history, and I’m super stoked about it. So forget about this intro… LET’S GET TO IT!!!

Change: +$7,456 or +136.33%

February Net Worth: $1,987

YOU GUYS. LOOK AT IT! There’s a new line! A line that indicates the difference between negative and positive! AND MY NET WORTH LINE CROSSED THAT LINE! What, what, WHAT is this, I don’t even?!?

Stephanie, WHERE DID ALL THIS MONEY COME FROM?!?

The obvious one: the cash increase of over $8,000. Unfortunately I can’t actually provide much insight into this, as all I really feel comfortable saying is that some checks that were owed to me came in. And I cashed them. This filled up my Emergency Fund, most of my Wedding Fund, and even my regular savings goals for the time I’m expecting to be unemployed/underemployed.

I won $500 in Capital One 360’s “What are you #SAVING4” contest, just by tweeting a picture of my fiancé and myself, telling them I was saving up for our wedding. Haven’t I said that Capital One 360 is my favorite bank? LOVE IT. And that $500 will certainly be helpful for our wedding, so I’m quite a happy camper.

My car increased in value again. This is just one of those fluke things – some times of year, a 2004 Toyota Camry is just worth more than other times. I get the value from Kelley Blue Book every month, not from any “depreciation” method or anything like that – so it’s helpful to think of my car’s value like stock values: it goes up and down with the market.

Speaking of the stock market: I had a pretty good month there, in my retirement accounts anyway. Also bolstering that value is some cash that I put aside in a savings account. Remember when I used to put all my retirement savings in a savings account? (Yeah, that’s a link to a Net Worth Update from 2008. Old school.)

For the time being, that practice is back. With the whole “unemployment/underemployment” thing I’ve got going on right now, it seems too risky to put money directly into my Roth IRA, where it’ll be locked up. Putting it in a savings account “holding pattern” means I can get at it if I completely drain my emergency fund, or I can move it to my Roth once I get a job.

So you might be wondering why I keep writing it as “unemployed/underemployed.” The truth is, I’m actually not completely unemployed at the moment – just “underemployed” (working less than full time). I picked up a freelance project just last week (one that I’m super excited about, by the by), and I’m hunting some leads on more freelance work. All while interviewing and job hunting for full-time work. Not really a surprise, as I’m just not a person that can sit still without a project to work on for more than, uh, 2 seconds.

But, you know, it probably only really counts if I can keep it positive through September. Or, if it does dip back down in the negatives (I am underemployed, after all), get it back up into the positive numbers again by that day in September. But whatever – this is a really good milestone on my financial journey, and I intend to continue my dance party.

]]>I’m officially declaring this “The Most Topsy-Turvy Month Ever.” Why? Because even though the worth of my assets went down in several key categories, the reasons those decreased were not bad; and even though my total net worth increased this month, the reason it did so is bad. Welcome to Bizarro World, folks!

Change: +$1,117 or +16.96%

January Net Worth: -$5,469

The Good-Bad (Where I Lost Money)

My cash reserves went down by a staggering $3150 dollars in January. That’s because I finally paid out money for two things I’ve been saving up for: my upcoming vacation in Ireland (now paid in full!) and some wedding expenses. So no big deal there – I saved up the money, then used the saved money to pay for these things. Awesome.

My retirement accounts also lost just north of $500 over the month, but that really doesn’t bother me. The markets are down as a whole, so it’s not surprising. I’m in it for the long-haul when it comes to retirement, anyway, so a one month swing is not really a problem.

The Bad-Good (Where I Made Money)

It makes me extremely nervous and anxious to even write about this. It’s not that I did anything wrong – it’s just because it’s a very uncomfortable situation.

The “Other” line of my assets on my net worth balance sheet is now sitting at $4,465. Some of it is my Lending Club account, which grew a little over the month. Some of it is my fiancé’s half of the rent money, which I forgot to collect from him in January. Those things are fine – good, even.

But the rest of that money is an uncashed check for my accrued PTO (Paid Time Off) from my job, because I was laid off at the end of the day this past Friday.

It’s tough. Obviously, I can’t say much about what happened, but I can say that I am still very emotionally raw. And being unemployed affects everything in my financial world: the wedding, my upcoming trip to Ireland, my Emergency Fund, my retirement savings, my “positive net worth by September” goal, my ability to make payment on my debts (student loans and car payment), my ability to make rent… it’s all in varying amounts of jeopardy in the foreseeable future.

Halt all wedding plans that include an outlay of money. I have some DIY projects I can work on that we already own the materials for, but anything that involves spending money? That’ll have to wait. I was about one day away from ordering my dress, even. The only thing I will make an exception for is anything surrounding the “legal” parts of the wedding – the marriage license/officiant – because the marriage is happening no matter what our money situation is!

Halt all retirement savings (outside of a savings account). I have a high-yield online savings account specifically to catch money before depositing it into my Roth IRA. But putting money into the IRA itself would freeze up that cash, which I can’t risk right now. Still, I can put some money aside in the savings account, where it’s still perfectly “liquid.” When I get a new job, then I can make the transfer from the savings account to the actual IRA, if I haven’t used up that savings.

No eating out, unless it’s a networking meal. Gonna have to cancel some dinner plans this week, because I need to stretch the money I have for an indefinite amount of time. But I will absolutely make an exception to take someone out for lunch or coffee to discuss my job hunt.

Apply for Unemployment Insurance payments. I’m actually half done with this step – I started the application the day after I was let go. Just need to update my résumé and upload it.

Make job-hunting my new full-time job. Not only does the Commonwealth of Virginia require that I do this to qualify for unemployment; it’s just common sense. My job right now is to find a new job.

Needless to say, if you know of a company looking for a spunky, energetic spreadsheet wizard with strong merchandise planning, company culture, and customer service experience, contact me.

]]>HERPY DEW BEER! (Translation: Happy New Year!) It’s been a whirlwind December (as it usually is), so I can hardly believe that it’s time for this month end/year end update already! You might remember from November’s update that I was worried about December possibly (probably!) being a down month. Let’s check in and see if that’s what happened:

Change: +$2,142 or +24.54%

December Net Worth: -$6,586

That’s pretty far from a “down month,” wouldn’t you say? Woohoo! Much of that gain comes from a bump in the value of my retirement accounts, but I’ll take it!

Also in December, the video game fundraising group (yes, that’s a thing) that I founded and organize raised $4134 for the organization charity: water, to provide clean water to people who need it in Cambodia and Ethiopia. So I’m feeling pretty good about that! I spent all the money in my “Charity” savings account on the fundraiser (mostly on supplies and food for the volunteers), and I still came out with a positive increase to my net worth? WIN WIN WIN!

8.5 months to go to get to my “Positive Net Worth” goal, and now $6,586 is the amount I need (or, I suppose, $6,586 + $1!). That’s about $775/month that I need in net worth increases to get there. Not too bad, I’d say – so long as this pesky wedding thing doesn’t cost me too much along the way.

Speaking of the wedding, based on our total budget and what we’ve spent so far, and what’s in our Wedding saving account as of now, we need to put aside another $1452.99 at this point (yeah, the 99 cents is really how the numbers came out!), and the goal is to have that money all set aside by April, so that’s $363.25/month between the two of us – totally do-able, I think.

$775.00/month in general net worth increase + $363.25/month in wedding savings (at least until April) = $1138.25/month that I need to squirrel away. I only averaged $1021.42/month in net worth increases in the months of 2013, so it might be a little tough to do… but then again, the wedding savings is between two of us, and only until April. So I’m optimistic that I’ll get it done.

]]>Happy Holidays! I’m in full-on holiday-crazy mode at work, my Christmas tree is up and decorated at home, and I’ve got an 18-pound turkey in my freezer (hey, it was $0.59/pound!), so we’re definitely due for an update on how my Net Worth came out in November.

Still, there are some things going on here that will affect my net worth in the coming months:

Retirement Savings

I’m happy to report the value of my retirement accounts came within $25 of $20,000 in November! That’s obviously subject to the whims of the stock market, so I can only be proud of those gains up to a point.

Still, it means it took me a year and two months to get my retirement funds from $10,000 to $20,000 – so now the goal will be to get to $30,000 within one year from now. Totally do-able, I think. Though it does mean I’ll be working on two challenges at once: Positive Net Worth by September, and $30,000 in Retirement by November. Thankfully, those two goals go hand-in-hand!

Cash Savings

The other large gain I made this month was in my cash accounts – so, savings for goals that are less than five years away. The largest gains were in the Wedding fund and my Travel fund. This is both good and bad, in a way: The reason I’m focusing on these two is that each has a large expenditure planned for 2014.

By January I will have to hand over all of my Travel savings for my upcoming international trip in March (care to guess where I’m headed?) and the Wedding savings will be drained pretty consistently as we approach the big day in August.

So my net worth gains in these categories are only temporary – but that’s okay. The whole point of saving up for travel and the wedding is so that I can spend on these things. It’ll just be a little psychologically painful to see the numbers go down.

I’m also draining my Charity savings account entirely in the month of December, as I do most years. I run a video game marathon fundraiser at the end of December, so whatever’s left in the account will be donated to that and to other causes I support. I don’t do all this donating in December for tax reasons (I do not have enough deductions to itemize my taxes, you see) – I just do it because that’s how I roll.

Basically, between paying for my trip, wedding expenses, the charity drive, and Christmas, I expect December to be a down month, net-worth-wise. Still, it’s exciting to see that I did manage to get it up above negative $10,000 this year!

Questions? Critiques? Words of encouragement? Leave them in the comments!

]]>The past two months have been rough for me – financially, and otherwise. I had to move under not-very-ideal circumstances, and money for the move itself was tight. As August came to a close, I made a prediction that my net worth could go down as much as $2000 total because of the ordeal. Here’s how that actually panned out:

September: +$92 or +0.85% October: -$316 or -2.95%

Current Net Worth: -$11,016

So, negative $224 overall – which is, admittedly, about one-tenth of the damage I was expecting/fearing because of the move. And my original fears weren’t unfounded: we had a move a month early, thus paying rent on two apartments for the entire month of October (just to secure the new apartment), and we had to lay down another month’s rent in security deposit, without getting anything back from the old apartment (because the apartment only took a $100 security deposit from me in the first place). I was also terrified that we’d owe some huge amount in cleaning or repair fees to the old apartment, based on some bad reviews that have shown up online saying that happened to others that moved out of our old complex.

Thankfully that last bit didn’t happen, which accounts for about $1300 of myFr “miscalculation.” After my fiancé and I spent many hours cleaning the old apartment (I spent four full hours on just the oven and stove!) and repairing the few tiny dings in the walls, the apartment looked “better than any others I’ve seen this autumn!” according to the apartment rep who did our walk-through. PHEW! Relief-o-rama!

From now on, we’ll actually save a bit of money when it comes to rent (thank goodness!): Savings, new rent vs. 2012-2013 rent: $14/month Included utility (Water & Sewer) in new rent: $25/month Savings in shorter commutes for both of us: $28/month New lease length: 2 years Total overall savings for the new apartment: $1608

That savings will cancel out the extra month’s rent we had to pay for October, with a little bit left over as real savings (sadly, only a little bit – rent is expensive in the Washington DC suburbs!).

The Wedding

We set a budget for the wedding ($4,000), which is approximately 14% of the national average for what a wedding costs. As with most things here on Poorer Than You, that’s part choice, part necessity. We’re paying for the wedding by ourselves, with no outside financial help.

Since we’re footing the bill, we’re keeping the budget low both because we don’t have much more money than that to spend on the occasion, and because we have other things in our lives that we want to give financial priority to. You can get a good idea about what those “other things” are for me in the Savings Snowball, below.

Since the engagement, we’ve set a date (the end of August, 2014) and paid in full for a venue and a few incidental expenses, leaving us with about half of the total budget left for everything that isn’t the venue. $2,000 for food, drinks, decor, the legal paperwork, music, fancy clothes, and whatever else.

I’m not going to lie: being on such a tight budget in such an expensive area has been a source of high stress these last few months. I feel much better now that we’ve found (and secured) a venue within our budget, but it still feels like there’s a long road ahead of us with a lot of potential pitfalls on the way.

Savings Snowball Update

Especially thanks to the upcoming wedding, I’ve spent some time re-evaluating my savings goals and priorities. I use a “Savings Snowball” method to organize my savings, which works like this:

You list out all of your debts (or goals, in my case) in a priority order, each with a minimum payment that you have to contribute each month. Then, you take any extra money you have each month, and throw it at the goal on the top of the list, until that goal is entirely eliminated.

Once the top goal is gone, you contribute everything you can into the next goal on the list, and so on and so forth, your monthly payments “snowballing” and growing as you move down the list.

Last time we checked in on my Savings Snowball in March, nothing much had changed, because I was still waffling back and forth on whether to put my Wedding Savings or my Lending Club investments at the top of the list. Of course at that time, I didn’t know I was less than 18 months away from wedding bells! The choice seems obvious now, of course, but I hadn’t made up my mind then.

Also, my fiancé and I had several long talks about long-term goals, savings, and finances (and I highly recommend all engaged couples do the same). This lead to me finding a few new goals I wanted to work toward, to add to my snowball.

I also added a few new savings account that aren’t on this Snowball list, because they’re “rolling expenses” instead of a savings goals:

Car Maintenance. I found that I wasn’t anticipating repairs on my car well, and every time something went wrong with my car, I’d end up wiping out my Emergency Fund to pay for it! So in addition to the new goals on here, I’ve started moving $50/month into the new Car Maintenance account.

Gifts. I’m a gifter. It’s one of my Love Languages (no joke), so I have a tendency to go overboard and (especially at Christmas) spend a bit too much gifting to my friends and family. Rather than see this send my spending a major curveball, I finally set up a savings account for gifts, and am putting $100/month there for now (Christmas is coming awfully quickly!).

These two don’t get a space on the list, because they don’t have concrete numbers where they become “achieved,” so they can’t be snowballed. I suppose that’s true for Travel and Charity, as well, but if I get to the point where those two are at the top of the list, I’ll give them concrete numerical goals to fix that issue!

I plan to revisit the Savings Snowball in January, when some of the goal amounts will likely change with the new year. There will also be some changes to the Wedding goal, as we send payments off to vendors to pay for the darn thing!

]]>First, a correction: in the last update, I left off one little digit while calculating my net worth, and the final number came out totally wrong. Instead of what I reported, March really looked like this: +$2,148 or +12.81%.

Ahem – sorry about that, folks. Now back to our irregularly-scheduled catch-up update!

Your eyes do no deceive you! That is indeed positive growth in all five months, culminating in a 26% increase since March. Woohoo!

But before we all put on our celebration hats (which we’re all going to do no matter what because September is my birthday), the bad news is coming…

September is going to suck (other than my birthday). Our apartment complex raised the rent (again) this year, and raised it right out of our price range this time. There will be more about that in future posts, but the short story is:

We went pleaded with our apartment office to work with us (got nowhere), then shopped around, found a lovely new place closer to work for both of us (at a lower price than our current rent) – but in order to secure it, we’ll need to rent it a whole month before our current lease runs out (so pay an extra month’s rent), and also cough up a month’s rent for a security deposit, too.

So if we’re very, very careful, my net worth update next month will be no more than a $2,000 drop. Yeah. There goes most of the progress since March.

To end on a high note (because one must always sandwich bad news in between two pieces of good news): I’m getting married! The Boyfriend (henceforth “The Fiancé”) proposed back in July. So there will be at least a few wedding financial updates here, though probably not too many (I have no intention of turning this into a wedding blog).

Got any really good wedding-on-a-budget or moving-on-a-budget advice for me?

]]>Happy April Fools Day yesterday! Sorry about misleading you – Mortimer is completely fictional, and there is no new author coming to PoorerThanYou at this time. You’re stuck with just me, for now! If you’d like to see my pranks from years past, follow these links:

Love it! Debts went down, as did my cash-on-hand, but that was alright because most of that went into my retirement account, which grew a little on its own, too. My car actually regained a good chunk of its value (+10%), which certainly helped!

Still, I’ll have to work hard to make that happen. March was the last month where “expected windfalls” like tax returns or work bonuses factor in for me. From here on out, it will be an uphill battle. I probably won’t make it most months! But I can try to get close, and hopefully knock it out of the park once in a while to make up for the sluggish months.

Savings Snowball Update

While we’re here, let’s check in with le’ savings snowball! I manage my savings the same way many people manage their debt: with a “snowball plan!” If you are not familiar with snowball plans, they work like this:

You list out all of your debts (or goals, in my case) in a priority order, each with a minimum payment that you have to contribute each month. Then, you take any extra money you have each month, and throw it at the goal on the top of the list, until that goal is entirely eliminated.

Once the top goal is gone, you contribute everything you can into the next goal on the list, and so on and so forth, your monthly payments “snowballing” and growing as you move down the list.

Last time we checked in on my Savings Snowball in October, it looked like this:

Name

Goal Total

Progress

Monthly Payment

Emergency Fund

$5,000

$3175

All that I can

Travel

Rolling

$1142

$150

Weddings

Rolling

$631

$75

Future Car Fund

$10,000

$175

$50

Charity Fund

Rolling

$275

$30

Retirement

$5,000/year

$4772

$0

Some updates since then to each category:

Emergency Fund

Somewhere along the way, I changed my mind about how much I wanted to keep in my E-fund. I think it had a lot to do with my Positive Net Worth by September 2014 challenge. Extra money sitting in an E-fund savings account doesn’t earn much interest, so it doesn’t really help me with that challenge.

So I dropped the goal back down to $3,000, which dropped it off the list as completed!

Travel

I’ve taken a few trips home to my family in Upstate New York, and also used some funds to see the Cirque du Soleil show “O” while on a business trip to Las Vegas. Work paid for everything else on that trip, but I did lay out the money for the show to have some fun with my coworkers while we were out there (my first trip to Las Vegas!).

I think I might take a big trip sometime in the next year or so (maybe someplace international even, if I get my passport renewed), but until I make real decisions and plans regarding that, I’ll just leave the funds as they are and contribute the minimum amount. So that keeps it from being the top goal in the snowball.

Weddings

No new weddings attended since the last update, but there’s at least 2 coming up this summer, which I’ve already started buying outfits and gifts for. Somehow, it’s that time of year again already!

Retirement

I hit $5,000 for the year early last year, but then the counter restarted on January 1st! Around the time I did my taxes this year, I made a $1,600 contribution to my 2012 Roth IRA, since that option was still open to me. (You can contribute to a previous year’s IRA up until April 15th the next year, assuming you haven’t hit the dollar-amount contribution limit, which I haven’t yet for 2012.)

For my own purposes of contributing $5,000/year to my IRA, I’ll count that $1,600 for 2013, as well as everything that’s been deducted from my paychecks for my 401(k).

New Top Goal…?

The problem now, of course, is that none of my savings goals really stick out as a “top goal” right now – the one that sits at the top of the snowball and gets every extra dollar I can throw at it. The way I see it, there are really two ways I could go:

Weddings vs. Lending Club

The “Weddings” fund is the most promising candidate out of what’s currently in the snowball list. There’s plenty of them every year now, and maybe someday I’ll have to lay out a much bigger chunk of cash to throw one of my own (there are no solid plans for that yet, though, so don’t get excited, Mom). That will require more money than what I’m currently putting in with the minimum payment, so maybe it should spend some time at the top of the snowball.

On the other hand, I’ve been investing a good chunk of money in my Lending Club lender account to help on my Positive Net Worth by September 2014 challenge. So really, the challenge is the goal, and Lending Club is just the specific tool. But since all of my savings accounts count toward the goal, Lending Club is the only concrete account that embodies that specific goal.

I haven’t made up my mind about this yet, so rather than reveal what my Savings Snowball looks like now, I’m opening up this decision for comment – what do you think my top goal should be right now? My Weddings fund, or my Lending Club working-toward-a-positive-net-worth-by-September-2014 fund?

]]>The world didn’t end and I somehow entered my 27th year more-or-less unscathed. So how did the financials stack up, when 2012 was all said and done? (And 2013 is already 1/6th of the way done! Egads!)

That, my friends, is what I call three productive months! I’m not ashamed to say I’m proud of the numbers in this update. Those increases put my net worth up to -$16,771 (yeah, negative sixteen grand).

Woot! I beat the plan by over $100/month! Which means from this point forward, I only need to hit an average of $932/month in net worth increase over the next 18 months to reach my goal.

These over-achieving months early on are really vital to me. First of all, they give me confidence in the idea that this plan is totally do-able. More importantly, they will help pad any slow months later on, so that I don’t have to play catch-up if I can’t quite maintain this super-charged pace.

So how did I manage that nice growth these past few months? Well, I’m glad you asked!

December

Honestly, it surprised me that there was any increase in this month at all! Between Christmas presents (I’m a gifter. Like, a hello-my-name-is-Stephanie-and-I’m-a-giftaholic level gifter.) and cleaning out everything remained in my charity savings account for my video game marathon fundraiser, I was expecting a net worth decrease for December, actually.

So what saved December?

I have a roommate now! Sharing the cost of my apartment has freed up some of the money that I was paying in rent to go to net-worth-increasing projects, instead. Even though I still pay the majority of the rent (we split the bill based on our respective income levels), every dollar freed up by sharing the load can be put to more productive use.

Continued effort on my car loan and student loan repayments. I’m only paying the minimums (because the interest rates are fixed low rates), but still made $335 in progress on all of my debts.

January

The gains in this month were a little easier to understand right off the bat. My retirement funds exploded by more than $1,000 in January – nearly 10%! Part of that can be attributed to the dividends that my funds paid out, all of which were automatically reinvested into the same funds. All very nice to see – I just hope things keep up (or at least, steady) during these very uncertain times in the market.

Despite some unexpected travel (for a funeral, unfortunately), January rocked it. Not as much as February, though!

February

Tax refunds! Woooooo! Okay, not really something to get that excited about. Honestly, a tax refund is often just referred to as the government repaying its interest-free loan to you. And I actually did everything I could to avoid a big tax refund: adjusted my paycheck withholdings to try to get to that “sweet spot” of a very small tax refund. But, for whatever reason, it didn’t really work and I got a big fat direct deposit in February, anyway (and a small one from the Commonwealth of Virginia, as well).

March Forth*

What’s next? Not much specific, I’m afraid! Aside from some small things (there are two weddings this year that will draw some cash out of my “Weddings” savings fund, for example), I will mostly be focused on packing away that $932/month to hit my net worth goal.

Questions? Comments? There’s a comment section below for that!

*Get it? This blog post was put online on March fourth, which is the only day on the calendar that is a complete sentence (albeit, a misspelled one), and this section is about looking into the future, the month of March specifically. I hope you’re half as amused by this as I am, cause I’m dying over here!